The Vatican Lifts Its Veil Of Mystery

November 03, 1991|By Michael Kilian.

WASHINGTON — For nearly a year, National Geographic writer Bart McDowell and photographer James Stanfield explored one of the most mysterious places on Earth, lying not at the headwaters of the Amazon or on the high plateau of the Himalayas, but in the center of Rome.

Their assignment was the Vatican, a city-state occupying all of 108.7 acres (you can walk all the way around it in 40 minutes), and possessing an official population of just 416. But it is home to the nerve and spiritual center of a religious empire that embraces 906 million Catholics and constitutes the largest Christian denomination on the planet.

Their exploration was a success. Although they are not Catholic, and were at first greeted with frosty non-cooperation, McDowell and Stanfield gradually won the confidence and friendship of the locals-most notably that of Pope John Paul II-and gained unheard-of access to the Vatican`s inner workings and centuries-old secrets. Within its sanctified walls they found, among other things, pinball machines installed for the amusement of altar boys, a jail

(currently unused), a shelter for street people and a supermarket whose low prices attract black marketeers.

This month, National Geographic unveiled the results of these exploratory labors: a 74-picture exhibition of Stanfield`s photographs staged in the Vatican Library (its first photo exhibit ever), and a 140-picture, 232-page National Geographic book, ``Inside the Vatican,`` unveiled at a recent luncheon in the National Geographic`s Washington headquarters.

The photo exhibit will move to the National Geographic`s Explorers Hall museum in Washington Jan. 13. The book is being published in 10 languages-including, of course, Polish.

`Awesome feeling`

``The word `Vatican` conjures up an aura of power, of secrecy, privacy, color, culture,`` said Stanfield, a former Milwaukee Journal staff member who has traveled to more than 100 countries in his career. ``And I think once I was there, this awesome feeling, viewing the magnificence of the Vatican, it never left me. In fact, it was enhanced.``

Occupying less space than the U.S. Capitol grounds and only one-eighth the size of New York`s Central Park, this smallest-in-the-world nation has been an official city-state only since 1929, when the Roman Catholic Church signed a treaty with Italy establishing it as such.

Yet its reach extends around the world (the Vatican has diplomatic ties with 123 nations) and back to the time of the Roman Empire.

It was on grounds now occupied by the Vatican that the mad Emperor Caligula enjoyed his sadistic, macabre circuses, and where the Emperor Nero ordered Christians fed to the lions and otherwise tortured and killed.

Among those who were martyred on that occasion was St. Peter, the first pope. He was crucified upside down near what is now St. Peter`s Basilica (the world`s largest Christian church), and his bones are believed to lie beneath its altar, a belief substantiated by considerable archeology.

The Vatican was founded in the 4th Century by the Emperor Constantine, after his conversion to Christianity. Since then it has come to know a lot of bones and bloodshed. From there, popes ordered the slaughters known as crusades, innumerable executions of infidels and the torture-deaths of countless heretics. Some popes, especially the Borgian Alexander VI, were as notorious for their greed, fornication and homicides as they were for their art collections and patronage.

Michelangelo`s magic

For more than a millennium, the Vatican was crude and fortress-like. Its incomparably beautiful basilica and accompanying structures were initiated by Pope Julius II in 1506, taking 120 years to complete.

Julius` name is inextricably linked with the artist Michelangelo, whose immortal works he commissioned. But Julius was also known as ``Il Terribile,`` because he spent so much of his tenure waging terrible wars against political rivals all over Italy.

The modern-day Vatican is a far more peaceful and enlightened institution. Although Catholic dogma was long intolerant of other faiths, the denomination now flourishes amicably in the pluralist United States (the Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago is the world`s largest). Still, as the enduring strife between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland demonstrates, the religion has not entirely escaped its tumultuous legacy.

For all its mysteries, according to McDowell, the Vatican is also much different from the present-day image many hold of it: a place of bizarre ritual, intrigue and fabulous wealth.

Although the Vatican bank did get mixed up in the scandalous collapse of Italy`s Banco Ambrosiano in 1982, it survives largely on collections-one-third of them from U.S. Catholics-and suffered markedly from the decline of the American dollar in the 1980s.

McDowell cites a Fortune magazine study of Vatican assets that found that ``with investments of some $500 million, the Vatican commands fewer financial resources than many U.S. universities.``